The Omniverse stirred.

Giant silver Branches moved along the sky, contrasting it like metal veins in an obsidian cave. Although obsidian was still rather bright compared to the unfathomable darkness that lay past the Branches. Even the most accurate eyes couldn’t spy anything in it. Yet, one knew there was movement. Like swirls in the mist, there was distant awareness of something invisibly writhing. A myriad of creatures and consciousnesses, laying beyond the reasonable world. They were suffering at the light and they hated it.

Inside that reasonable world, where the sense could discern what lay ahead, swayed giant Leaves. Even though their size was already incomprehensible, their insides were larger still. Those Leaves served as portals, entrances to worlds, all connected to the Branches through Stems of solid light. Paths glittering like the stars in the skies of the worlds, inspired by those very Stems.

It was too large to be properly perceived. Every last life, every divine spark, every mortal, every angel, every demon and every god walked, crawled and flew in the confines of the Omniverse. The majority concentrated on those Leaves. Of the demons, most were confined to the Roots. Of all categories, the fewest, at any given time, were those who walked the Branches.

And one, one single thing, unique in all of this endless, ever-growing expanse, doomed to one day collapse under its own weight, walked on one of those very Branches at that moment. Walked on all fours, having expanded his mass as much as his energy reserves allowed him to. He was carrying a redhaired tiger girl on his back, with a white-haired, moth-winged angel at his side.

Apexus, Aclysia and Reysha, the three of them had been walking for a long time. It wasn’t clear for how long. There was no way to tell the time, no sun or other mark in the sky that they could have read the passage from. From where they were, not much above could be seen anyway. They were following a trench in the bark, perhaps calling it a valley would be more accurate.

They couldn’t even use the times they had slept to make a rough estimate of how many days had passed. Aclysia didn’t need sleep, although even she sometimes insisted they sat down for a moment so she could rest her consciousness. Apexus and Reysha, on the other hand, sometimes passed out. Especially the Ragressian Rogue spent much of her time in some variation of sleep. When she was awake, she usually wept. She had stopped asking for forgiveness.

Few words had been exchanged. The images of Ctania were still burned into their minds, leaving their thoughts as tattered as the clothes they still wore. All that was clear, between the three of them, was that they needed to move far away. Getting one leaf further wouldn’t be enough. Although they weren’t aware quite how, they knew that Apotho had been important in some way. The Church would search for them and the trio was sure of just one thing for now. They wanted to survive. Given how mixed their experiences with the Church were, they weren’t willing to bet on it for their future chances.

The person they were more afraid of, Apotho and his grudge, they couldn’t escape. The Warlock had said he could find them wherever they went. They believed him, for various reasons. Regardless, it was best to go somewhere nobody knew who they were and where nobody could find it out by chance either.

Although their choice in this regard would soon be made for them.

“We need water,” Apexus spoke up. That was the one reliable measure of time they had, thirst. More pressing than hunger even, it was the countdown. They had stopped shortly on some Leaves to alleviate those problems for a few days at a time. Time that was now, once more coming to an end. “How much longer, Aclysia?”

“I don’t know,” Aclysia responded, her tone was tired, drained of emotions. That same lack of energy made her rationality cold and mechanical. Not her usual self, but exactly what they needed at the current time to reach a point at which survival was no longer a question of the next week. “I want to change Branches, at least. The more splits we cross, the less likely it will be someone can stumble over us.” She looked up, pondering for a moment. “If you could fly, you could perhaps see where the next split is.”

Apexus adjusted his wings a little bit to let Reysha slump into a more comfortable position. Her arms were dangling past his shoulders. The distorted, humanoid skeleton was barely fit for walking on four legs, but it worked well enough. Were it not for the fact that his ears still picked up her soft breathing and the warmth of a living being on his back, Apexus would have thought she was dead.

Carrying her like this wasn’t too cumbersome. In a slightly lucky stroke of fate, it actually helped him tremendously. The space around the branches was of a mild temperature which, to a cold-liquid creature like the slime, who had only known summer and underground heat for the few years of his life, was uncharacteristically cold. It limited his energy supply by a bit. Reysha’s body heat did quite a bit to counteract that.

Apexus was about to ask why she didn’t fly herself, when he noticed a black spot on the bark in front of him. He had to blink, make sure he wasn’t hallucinating. Everything around them had been shades of silver for days now. All differences had been in the texture of the bark.

At the floor of a valley like this, the ground was as smooth as a well-trodden dirt path. The walls surrounding them were more like the bark of an oak, with the ridges of its craggy appearance radiating that steady, silver glow, while the depths only had the colour, but spent no light of their own. This smaller design was true for the larger appearance of the Branch as well. At the bottom of the valley, less light shone from the bark than it did from the plateaus above. What was true on the level of the person translated to the level of the cosmos, in this case.

This was why the pitch-black dot was so unusual. Apexus leaned in and inspected it closer, wondering what it was purely because it was something different in this beautiful, monotone landscape.

It had legs. Ten tiny legs, thin like an ant’s. The main body was round, the size of a button. The carapace of its back opened and closed, parting into many smaller pieces like a rose made of shark teeth. Those teeth weren’t black, not really, but the extremely dark purple could easily be mistaken as simple black.

Apexus, curious, hungry and thirsty, opened his mouth. It had been a while since he had eaten something new. Whenever they visited a new leaf, it was just the basic prey animals or just plain grass that he got to eat.

The insect squirmed in his mouth when the sharp teeth scraped it off the bark. It was too late though. The thin membrane in Apexus’ mouth allowed for the equivalent of reverse-swallowing to take place. Apexus filled the confined space with slime and, with nowhere else to go, the prey dissolved where it was. Eating small things this way was rather relaxing, normally, at least.

The slime felt a sudden jolt of pain. It started at the Speaking Plates, fused to the upper half of his jaw, and spread through the skeleton from there. Everything that was connected to the Permanent Growth felt like it was lit on fire. Spasming violently, Apexus got up on his hindlegs. Reysha was thrown off and awakened rather suddenly when her head hit the ground at a harmless height and angle.

“Apexus?!” Aclysia shouted, having no idea what was happening. All she could see was a purple shimmer wrap around her beloved’s bones. “No, no, not you too,” she stammered in a panic. Although it was the wrong colour, it reminded her of the dark ritual Apotho had conducted.

“Please no, forgive me, I didn’t mean to…” Reysha crawled up Apexus, feeling that exact same trauma impede on her, reinforced a hundredfold by the vivid aftereffects of the potion.

Apexus fell to the floor and rolled on his back. The outer layers of his slime hardened and became brittle, peeling away in paper-thin layers. His life was robbed from him in a cruel and unusual way. It wasn’t drained, the insect sitting in his mouth wasn’t the receptor of any of the energy flow. Nobody was. Apexus’ essence was, instead, pushed from his body by the raw power that tiny insect possessed. He was eating it and it was replacing him with something different.

With what little control he still had over his body, Apexus opened his mouth and scratched at his throat. There was no word he could formulate, slime and the insect’s body blocked his Speaking Plates. All he managed to get out was a pleading, high-shrieking cry of panic. It was a miserable, scratching sound, like a metal nail getting dragged over a piece of smooth slate stone.

While Aclysia sunk helplessly to her feet, unable to find any solution to this, Reysha moved with her usual agility for the first time since their departure. Apexus had hunted for her, fed her, kept her alive, held her and now something was happening with him. Noir and the recent trauma kept her in a state where self-preservation was extremely low a priority, but him, she could not lose.

“Not you too, not because of me, please,” she repeated to herself over and over again. Starting with his scrapping hands, she inspected him as quickly as she could. It took her a while to realize what was going on. Between the continued spasms and the tininess of the cause, it wasn’t until Apexus completely unhinged his human jaw and revealed the insides to the silver glow that she could spot the insect. “I’ll save you, at least you, you can’t leave me, I need you!”

Her left-hand dove into the slime. Uncontrolled, it immediately started dissolved her skin, even as her extended claws grabbed the button-sized creature. Tried, slipped and tried again, until two nails got underneath and her hand ripped backwards. Drops of slime splattered about as Reysha’s left arm oozed black blood. For a moment, she held the insect, then it bit her and, surprised, she dropped it onto the floor.

It started scurrying away, but was stopped by Aclysia, ramming the heel of her boots on the tiny creature. “Die!” the angel shouted, her voice distorted by genuine hatred and fear. “Die, unnatural, unwanted thing!” Over and over again, she stomped down on it, no calm and no regard for the insect’s life crossing her for even a moment. Once it was nothing more than a crunched pile of dust on the floor, she turned around and fell on Apexus in a sudden hug. “Apexus… you stupid… inexperienced…” her words trailed off as her arms grew tighter around him.

Reysha, too, was embracing him with all her might. The pain faded almost immediately, leaving Apexus first exhausted, then confused. Out of reflex, he moved all four of his limbs to awkwardly answer the two women’s hugs. It wasn’t quite the same as he was flowing around them with his entire, liquid body, but it was the closest he could emulate.

They were a pile of relief and tears. Far more tears than needed. The incident broke a dam, tore down what walls their minds had erected against the collective trauma they had experienced. Emotions poured out in mindless sobs and endless tears and the need to hold onto each other for just a moment's safety in the silence of the Branches.

It didn’t solve anything. It was little more than a necessary relief of overburdening pressure. No matter how much they cried and cuddled up to each other, it didn’t make undone the things they’d seen. Nothing would ever do that. Only time and distance from it would allow them to move on from it, look at it with a more reasonable lens. It was too fresh. It couldn’t be solved. Not at that time. It would always be a scar that stayed. For now, it could be treated, although not healed.

Just like Aclysia couldn’t heal Apexus, not where they were. “It would attract more of them,” she explained, when they had calmed down a little bit.

“What was it?” Apexus asked and gained himself silent, confused stares, from both Reysha and Aclysia. It took them a moment to remember what he was. The knowledge he requested was so fundamental to living in the Omniverse that the fact that it had eluded him until that point was equally unsurprising and ridiculous. Nobody ever said that chickens laid eggs, just like nobody ever outright stated what magic attracted outside of Leaves.

“A Parasyte,” Aclysia answered and the name rang some bells.

Gizmo had mentioned them. As painful as those memories now were, the knowledge he had gained from the godlike Warlock’s split personality was the second layer of how Apexus operated in the world, right on top of his base instincts. He couldn’t discard it, no matter the source.

Parasytes, creatures born from that vast dark around the Omniverse, desperate to claw this bright existence back into illogical nothing. “Oh, my beloved…” Aclysia sighed. “Never try eating one again. Even you cannot withstand the raw corruption of all that is holy and good, it is evident.”

“Don’t leave me,” Reysha mumbled something less coherent. “Not again… I… don’t know what I could…” Again, she was crying. Her unsteady mind evoked memories without her volition. The past thirst for vengeance rose in her mind, only to shatter against the enormous guilt she now felt. Insanity and alchemy mixed to once more drown the little glimpse of the old Reysha that had acted moments earlier.

Her left arm was healed now, the black crust falling off and disintegrating without a trace.

Apexus, carefully, started moving. They had exchanged more words in the past minute than in the past… however long it had been. “Let’s keep moving,” he said, feeling the last remains of dried slime fall off his membrane. The damage was bothersome, but didn’t seem to impair him permanently. The thirst was worse on that front. “We need to find rest somewhere and… and talk… we haven’t really talked in so long…”

While Aclysia nodded, Reysha slumped to the side. Noir was once more taking effect, reducing her to little more than a puppet without strings.

They desperately needed to arrive somewhere.